Interviews with the Survivors
"I don't want to go back there. I don't want to go back to that kind of surroundings anymore."
-Mark Taylor
-Mark Taylor
"Watching my friend die is still traumatic, but it is in the past. I'm not trying to be mean. I just have to focus on today and looking at the positive and the future."
-- Sean Graves
-- Sean Graves
"I sat there banging my legs trying to make them work, but they wouldn't," Hochhalter says. "Then I thought maybe they had shot me with a tranquilizer, but I never expected I had been hit with a bullet and paralyzed permanently."
-Anne Marie Hochhalter
-Anne Marie Hochhalter
"At that point I didn't know where I was shot. I didn't even think I was injured. And I was thinking, 'I gotta get out of here.' So, I tried to stand up. I couldn't stand up. And so, I slid across the floor on my back head-first, pushing with this [the good] leg. I couldn't see very well; so I had to get out of there. When I got to the wall right next to the window, I rested for a little bit then finally decided to go ahead and try to get up and it took me two tries. My back was up against the wall, and I pushed with my leg and slid my back up against the wall, at that point I was standing and I kinda rolled over on my stomach... the window was broken already, so I tried to clear some of the glass."
--Patrick Ireland in a press interview
--Patrick Ireland in a press interview
"A teacher ran in yelling that there were two kids outside of the school with guns shooting other kids, and she was screaming at us to get underneath the desks. I got underneath [the desk] with two friends and we heard the gunshots coming from outside of the school, not knowing what was going on. It slowly was becoming more real to us as we were underneath the table and hearing the shots coming into the school and the two shooters getting closer to the library. They came into the library and immediately began to shoot other kids, and they would mock students and make fun of them and laugh. They came over to where I was and saw my friend Isaiah, who was black, and they began to make racial slurs against him. That was the last thing he heard in his life. Then they turned their guns toward my friend Matt. They were both killed. I was lying next to them in complete terror, paralyzed with fear. Soon after, they were over in my area. They left the library, leaving ten students dead in the library and a lot injured."
-Craig Scott
-Craig Scott
"I thought I was going to die. I really didn't think I was going to make it. We would hear shots, then we heard crying. We had no clue what was going on."- Katie Corona